Monday, December 27, 2004

"This world is not this world"

Several months ago I thought it prudent to shift my copy of Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors from my shelf of Second World War history to that of America's National Security State, alongside titles like The Paperclip Conspiracy and American Swastika. These books are next to my desk; the World War Two material is clear across the room. And if I can help it, I don't like to get up.
A story this weekend in Cuba's Granma, based upon the claims of a lawyer for two former French detainees of Gitmo, suggests I was right to move it within arm's reach: Prisoners were experimented on

AFTER Australian David Hicks’ horrific revelations concerning the torture he suffered in the Guantánamo concentration camp, including mysterious injections with substances of unknown origin, the lawyer for two of the French detainees: Nizar Sassi and Mourad Benchellali, released in July, recently announced in Paris that his clients suspect that they were also the victims of experiments in one of the most sinister interrogation centers at the US military base.

"The state organism is a whole with its own laws and rights, much like one self-contained human organism...which, in the interest of the welfare of the whole, also - as we doctors know - abandons and rejects parts or particles that have become worthless or dangerous."

In the latest edition of the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, lawyer Jacques Debray reported that Sassi and Benchellali, who were also forced to take suspect medication, are now wondering if they were victims of experiments carried out by their torturers.

"The doctor...if not living in a moral situation, where limits are very clear...is very dangerous."

To date, his clients have only agreed to recount a few details of what happened to them in Guantánamo, says Debray; “the French Intelligence Agency DST has explained to them that that would be better while other French nationals are still detained there,” said the lawyer. “But they have described similar scenes to those in Abu Ghraib,” he affirmed, specifying that the two former detainees, arrested in Pakistan and in US custody after the invasion of Afghanistan, didn’t even know that there was a war in Iraq until after their release.“In Guantánamo, they were received by U.S. soldiers who urinated on them when they were taken off the plane. At no point did they know why they were there,” he related.

"This world is not this world."

“They were interrogated at least 100 times, and before their interrogations, they would be taken past certain rooms from where they could hear screams. Nizar also told me that they were chained up in a room equipped with one-way mirrors where it was extremely cold. They also recounted that there were chambers where they would have to listen to extremely violent music. The two former Guantánamo detainees also spoke of “strange” medications that they were forced to take. “Once, after having received one of those medications, Nizar fainted and thinks that he was drugged without his knowledge for one or two days. They also received injections. They do not know what medication they were given but the two affirmed that one of the other detainees was covered in a rash after having received these medications. They are wondering if they were experimented on, “ the Parisian lawyer affirmed.

"Dr Clauberg ordered me to lie down on the gynecological table and I was able to observe Sylvia Friedmann who was preparing an injection syringe with a long needle. Dr Clauberg used this needle to give me an injection in my womb. I had the feeling that my stomach would burst with the pain."

“The medication bottles bore numbers and a doctor visited them to ask them if the medicines had had any effect. Other than those questionings, they were unable to see a doctor, except on one or two occasions, because in Guantánamo, everything functioned on a reward system.... Nizar and Benchellali affirmed that there were an “impressive number of psychiatrists” in Guantánamo and units reserved “for those who went crazy.”

"The SS doctors did their work just as someone who goes to an office goes about his work. They were gentlemen who came and went, who supervised and were relaxed, sometimes smiling, sometimes joking, but never unhappy. They were witty if they felt like it. Personally I did not get the impression that they were much affected by what was going on - nor shocked. It went on for years. It was not just one day."

As far back as last August, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet disclosed that doctors and other health professionals were complicit actors in the torture that took place in Abu Ghraib as well as in Afghanistan and that they were collaborating on the design and practice of psychological and physically coercive interrogation.

"I have no words. I thought we were human beings. We were living creatures. How could they do things like that?"

In emails recently received by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the FBI has involuntarily confirmed the horror lurking behind the bars of the cells installed there by the administration at the illegal US military base in Guantánamo. “I have seen a detainee seated on the floor of an interrogation room, wrapped in an Israeli flag, with loud music and flashes from an stroboscope,” an agent told his superiors in a email dated last July 30. The FBI erased the names of its agents and the dates of the described incidents in the emails obtained by the ACLU. FBI agents have participated in 747 detainee interrogations in Guantánamo, according to its own reports.

"The fact is that if you do something that is totally unbelievable, and you are incapable of believing, you don't believe it."

And for what it's worth, there's this, from "German Guy," posted December 15:

Please also note: We have reason to believe that many "terrorist" prisoners in US custody are being subjected to long periods of intense sensory deprivation and methods by which they acquire a new controlled personality. We think they are being programmed for something.

1250 Comments:

Jeff, your opening comment about shifting some of your WWII books to nearer at hand struck me. Clearly we have been down some of this road before as your pertinent parallel quotes show.

My own recent shifting of books has involved re-reading my old Erich Fromm collection (i liked his mix of pyschiatry, sociology, and marxism). In particular, his "The Sane Society" and "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness" gave me a (human) world view and surprisingly are as relevant today as when i first read them, the latter of these is an excellent deconstruction of the necrophilism of the Hitler regime that is turning out to have direct parallels with current america.

Apropos your post of agents and doctors involved in interrogations, I thought these excerpts about Eichmann and the bureaucrats interesting:

"Once the living human being is reduced to a number, the true bureaucrats can commit acts of utter cruelty, not because they are driven by cruelty of a magnitude commensurate to their deeds, but because they feel no human bond to their subjects. While less vile than pure sadists, the bureaucrats are more dangerous, because in them there is not even a conflict between conscience and duty; their conscience is doing their duty; human beings as objects of empathy and compassion do not exist for them."

"The case of Adolf Eichmann is symbolic of our situation and has a significance far beyond the one which his accusers in the courtroom in Jerusalem were concerned with. Eichmann is a symbol of the organization man, of the alienated bureaucrat for whom men, women and children have become numbers. He is a symbol of all of us. We can see ourselves in Eichmann. But the most frightening thing about him is that after the entire story was told in terms of his own admissions, he was able in perfect good faith to plead his innocence. It is clear that if he were once more in the same situation he would do it again. And so would we -- and so do we. The organization man has lost the capacity to disobey, he is not even aware of the fact that he obeys. At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization."

Jeff, the "capacity to doubt" is one of the great assets this site gives us.

For those on the darkside like myself, here is one of my favorite Fromm quotes: "Once I have discovered the stranger within myself I cannot hate the stranger outside of myself, because he has ceased to be a stranger to me."

Personally I am not satisfied with the way the supposed Islamist infiltration of the Army muslim chaplain program is being resolved and spun away i.e. as the overzealousness of a few paranoid FBI agents. I even heard James Woolsey mention it on NPR a couple weeks ago, as if it was ongoing. Obviously, it is difficult to untangle the strands of info, disinfo, and error, and you always have to be careful who you believe.

Now I am no doctor, Nazi or otherwise, but it seems to me that "programming" an individual has a much better chance of producing a genuinely motivated subject, if the subject himself is a willing participant in the process. So, maybe in the lawless, lunatic atmosphere of these prisons and camps, there is a good cop/bad cop sort of racket being played, where the inmate is led to believe they have a sympathetic confidant who is actually working with a Hidden Hand.

Not that I doubt much that ungodly experimental pseudo-science is indeed occuring, but perhaps certain quick-and-dirty covert ops, based on one of the oldest interrogator's cons in the book, are a side-product, not the central product, of such experiments.

Nice Blog!!! I thought I'd tell you about a site that will let give you places whereyou can make extra cash! I made over $800 last month. Not bad for not doing much. Just put in yourzip code and up will pop up a list of places that are available. I live in a small area and found quitea few. MAKE MONEY NOW